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Free Ultimate P2V (Physical to virtual) plugin for BartPE

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I've stumbled across a really neat tool to take a ghost image of an existing Server\Workstation\Laptop and turn it into a virtual machine. The process is performed using a Bart P2V plugin and is proving extremely handy to me.

This is a great tool if, for example, you have a bunch of legacy boxes running in your environment that could just as easily be run in a virtual machine, freeing up or tombstoning the old dedicated hardware. You can also take a ghost of your current workstation and import it into a VM, testing changes in a non-invasive way that could otherwise bork your box.

I am in no way associated with this project nor is any of the work mine, I just thought that I would share this great project as a search did not turn up any evidence of this plugin being previously posted in the forum.

Basic overview of the process is this: (there's a complete guide posted on the site with more indepth info)

Note: The following overview assumes that you have already created a new BartPE .ISO file which contains the plugins that the link above references. Once you have created this .ISO, continue with the following to succesfully deploy it.

1) Create a new custom virtual machine inside VMware Workstation and select "Windows XP" as the operating system type. This selection works for ghosted images that had been running either Windows 2003 or Windows XP. (I have not ghosted a W2k box yet to test that OS. The plugin does have entries for including Win2K as well as NT4.0 VMware drivers, however)

2) When you get to the portion of the creation wizard where it asks you for the drive interface, select SCSI rather than IDE

3) Choose Buslogic as the preferred driver.

4) Start the newly created virtual machine and boot the BarPE .ISO image that contains the P2V plugin as well as your imaging software (I use ghost as the authors suggest)

6) From within Bart, launch Ghost (or your imaging software) and import the image of whatever workstation (or server) that you have a "ghost" image of.

7) Reboot the virtual machine and let it BSOD once. This will assign the drive letter of C:\ to the ghosted partition. (if you check diskpart after you restore a ghost image, you'll notice that it has no drive letter. Trying to do a "sel vol 1" "assign letter=c" typically fails. This is the reason for the reboot)

8) Boot the VM back into bart from the .ISO file and run the VMware P2V plugin. Follow the instructions in the plugin to inject the correct driver\OS type. Basically you have to select the windows directory and choose to inject the LSIlogic and Buslogic SCSI drivers into the ghosted image. This will let you get past the 07B stop error that occurrs because windows doesn't natively have the VM scsi drivers necessary to boot the ghosted image.

Using the above process, I've been able to import ghost images of many Dell model workstations, servers and laptops.

There is also thread covering this plugin over at the VMware site, the thread can be found here: